(Phys.org) —Serious physics research has been in the news a lot this past week. First up: Researchers in Germany have set the stage for the introduction of a new super-heavy element to the periodic table after confirmation ...

Scientists estimate that there is a minimum of 320,000 viruses in mammals awaiting discovery. Collecting evidence of these viruses, or even a majority of them, they say, could provide information critical to early detection ...

(Phys.org) —A new gene that will equip wheat plants to resist the deadly stem rust disease has been discovered by an international team that includes plant scientists at the University of California, Davis.

(Phys.org) —It's a scenario straight out of a sci-fi horror flick. Scientists take a deadly virus that people can only catch from birds and genetically engineer it so we can give it to each other. Unfortunately, the threat ...

Molecular farming is an easy, fast, and safe method for producing vaccines and therapeutic proteins in plants. Now a team of Fraunhofer researchers from the USA has built up a Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) compliant ...

A fungus that has decimated amphibians globally is much older than previously thought, but may have recently spread through the global wildlife trade to new locations where amphibians have no immunity, reports a new study.

(Phys.org) —From within an ancient German gravesite to laboratories under the harshest extremes of scientific scrutiny, traces of DNA from a deadly disease illuminate the cold pages of history with modern insight.

People have always yearned to see into the future, to peek around the corner and make sense of what's going on, according to author and mathematician David Orrell. But predicting the future is difficult. And what's more, ...

On Twitter, a popular microblogging and social-networking service, statements about vaccines may have unexpected effects—positive messages may backfire, according to a team of Penn State University researchers led by Marcel ...

Workers digging a new railway line in London have uncovered what they believe is a burial ground containing victims of the Black Death—a plague that wiped out as much as half of London's inhabitants when it swept the city ...

Pandemic

A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan "all" + δῆμος demos "people") is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics exclude seasonal flu. Throughout history there have been a number of pandemics, such as smallpox and tuberculosis. More recent pandemics include the HIV pandemic and the 2009 flu pandemic.